In a near-future United States where temperatures have reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit and wildfires burn with a vengeance, a teenage girl from Arizona anxiously awaits her construction worker's father's return from his workplace.

A twentieth-century ranch caretaker in Montana finds his peace of mind disrupted when the ranch is sold to a corpulent gay Wall Street banker.

A high school cheerleader's uneventful life is shaken up when a crop duster—hired by her father to fly pesticides over his farm—comes to stay with them.

A woman hides from a hurricane in her home as her loved ones who have died pass through her house with haunting reminders of their deaths.

A veteran tells his acquaintance about his darkest memories as a solider the Vietnam War.

A young lute player is aided by a harmonizing spider who resides in her lute, unbeknownst to her. Though the spider becomes attached to the lute player, she continues to feel loneliness and longing for her home among other spiders in the forest of her birth.

When a superhero gives up on humanity, the US president picks the first person the superhero saved--a young, wealthy, Black woman in LA--to try to talk him out of destroying the world. When the superhero reveals dark facts about his past, the woman finds all her pre-prepared arguments seem meaningless.

Sent on a mission from the emperor, an expert wine-taster travels the countryside, seemingly oblivious to the war and death around him.

Five nuns survive the bombing of their convent during a war, but they must tend to unfinished business in the ruins before they can leave the town.

The world is at war: on one side, the corporate remains of human civilization. On the other, the aliens who have returned from Mars to live and regrow the Northern Hemisphere. In the midst of the war, one unnamed corporate solider realizes that their travel technology can be used to time-travel and takes that opportunity to try to save lives in the midst of this senseless violence.